Wanda Romanowski
Interview with Wanda Romanowski, head of the publications department, on putting INED’s quarterly journal, Population, on open access.
(Interview conducted in June 2022)
Why has the journal Population been put entirely on free and open access?
This move is part of a larger process under way at INED to develop and promote open science. For the Publications department specifically, the aim is to adapt our publications to open science norms. The Institute is concerned to make our published work available to as wide a public as possible. Free access is one means of widening the audience for our research studies, but it’s not the only one.
Until now, Population was diffused on several platforms, and all articles published more than a year earlier were already on open access, while more recent ones were on paid access either through institution and library subscriptions or per article for non-affiliated readers.
We’ve now put the entire journal on free access on Cairn to improve diffusion. Analysis of the last few years’ diffusion statistics showed that free article consultation rose at a much faster rate than consultation of articles through paid subscriptions. And there were next to no purchases of individual articles by non-institution-affiliated readers.
We also want to make the journal more attractive to authors: increasingly, researchers are required to publish in free access reviews to meet the criteria of the agencies funding their research projects.
Putting the entire journal on free access raises the issue of how to ensure its economic model: how can we compensate for the loss of paying subscriptions? Fortunately, we are participating in a “Subscribe to open”-type process wherein libraries choose to fund certain journals to enable their diffusion on open access. This is an interesting, innovative development in France. Cairn has just developed a new “Subscribe to open” program in partnership with a consortium of French university libraries (COUPERIN), the Agence Bibliographique de l’Enseignement Supérieur (ABES, Higher education library agency) and the Ministry of Higher Education and Research (MESR).
Will the switch to open access result in changes to the journal?
Population has been evolving for some time now toward norms that comply with open science recommendations. For example, we have just put in place publication agreements that will enable authors to retain copyright for their contributions. We are also establishing Creative Commons licenses that will make it easier to reuse and diffuse articles. And we have defined a self-archiving policy that we’ll soon be uploading on the Sherpa Romeo platform, the policy informs authors on what they have the right to do with their article in connection with a time frame. Moreover, we are working to make article appendices and article supporting material available on line. To help us achieve this goal, we’ve opened our INED Publications collection on the Nakala data warehouse, which enables us to attribute permanent identifiers—DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers)—to those appendices and related material.
As part of our plan to opening up research data, Population has just launched a new section called “Sources and data” that will include Data Papers.
And we’re setting up a data policy that will induce authors to provide the data that ensure the “replicability” of the findings presented in their articles.
Last, it’s important to clarify that alongside free-access digital diffusion and the new operations being put in place, Population will continue to be published on paper.
What are the specificities of Population?
For readers, starting today, anyone wishing to access or download a Population issue or particular article can do so entirely free of charge.
For authors, the system we’ve chosen for putting Population on open access has entailed zero costs for article submission or diffusion, contrary to the situation with other journals.
Another specificity of Population—one of the very few entirely bilingual French-English journals to come out simultaneously in both languages—is that INED organizes and funds all translations.
Finally, our publishing professionals are continually working to improve text and figure readability and presentation. And all submitted articles undergo rigorous, high quality scientific evaluation by the in-house editorial committee and “double blind” review by outside experts, where both reviewer and author identities are concealed from each other.